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Spencer History

The history of the SPENCER started in
1843 when the original SPENCER was commissioned to serve in the Revenue
Cutter Service. An iron hulled steamer, she served as a lightship off
Hampton Roads, Virginia until 1848. She was named after the former
Secretary of the Treasury John Canfield Spencer, who served in President
Tyler’s administration. The second cutter to carry the name SPENCER was
hull numbered W-36, commissioned in 1937. At an overall length of 327
feet, she first started service as a search and rescue unit patrolling
Alaska’s fishing grounds. After the United States entered World War II,
the Coast Guard temporarily became part of the U.S. Navy. SPENCER saw
significant combat action in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. In
the “Battle of the Atlantic,” she acted as a convoy escort and hunted
German submarines, sinking both the U-225 and U-175 in 1944. In late
1944, SPENCER reported to the Navy’s Seventh (Pacific) Fleet as a
Communications Command Ship. There she was credited with taking part in
a number of amphibious invasions including those on Luzon and Palawan in
the Philippines. After the war, SPENCER returned to her Coast Guard
duties serving as an Atlantic Ocean Station. Here she provided much
needed navigational assistance for the fledgling trans-Atlantic air
industry, and more importantly, acted as a search and rescue platform
for both airplanes and ships. In January 1969, SPENCER returned for
combat duty off the coast of Vietnam. For ten months she provided
barrier surveillance to prevent troops and supplies from getting into
South Vietnam. In November of 1969, SPENCER returned to the United
States to continue her peacetime mission of ocean station keeping.

The second SPENCER served the nation for
more than 37 years and when decommissioned in 1974, she was the most decorated cutter
in the Coast Guard’s fleet. Among the shipmates that sailed on the
second cutter SPENCER was Signalman First Class Douglas Munro. He is the
Coast Guard’s sole Medal of Honor recipient, who gave his life at
Guadalcanal when he used his Higgens boat to block evacuating Marines
from enemy fire.

The SPENCER you are standing on now, had her keel laid on 26 June 1982 in the Rhode Island
yards of R.E. Derecktor. She was launched on 17 April 1984 and was
commissioned into service on 28 June 1986. She is the fifth of thirteen
medium endurance “Famous Class” cutters commissioned by the United
States for Coast Guard service and the first cutter of the “B” class
built by Derecktor Shipyard. This latest SPENCER may not have been
commissioned for long, but her service record to date is quite
impressive. During a law enforcement patrol in 1987, SPENCER arrested 23
people and confiscated more than 46,000 pounds of marijuana from four
smuggling vessels. While on a South Patrol in 1989, SPENCER rescued and
repatriated 538 Haitian migrants bound for the U.S., and later seized a
Panamanian freighter laden with 965 Lbs. of cocaine. SPENCER made
headlines again in March of 1991 when she towed a disabled U.S. Navy
frigate, a ship nearly twice her size, to safety. That same year,
SPENCER participated in the search for a missing Air National Guard
paratrooper during the famous “Perfect Storm.”

In 1994, SPENCER repatriated over 1700
Haitian and Cuban migrants, and in early 1996, SPENCER responded to the
downed Alas Nacionales plane crash off the coast of the Dominican
Republic. In 1999, SPENCER was the on-scene commander for the tragic
Egypt Air 990 plane crash off Nantucket, controlling both U.S. Navy and
Coast Guard assets in search and rescue recovery efforts. In 2000,
SPENCER made a 1.2 metric ton drug bust in conjunction with the French
frigate VENTOSE. Following the tragic events of September 11th,
SPENCER conducted security patrols of New York and Boston. In 2002,
SPENCER towed a disabled fishing vessel safely home through twenty foot
seas.

SPENCER was deployed in
2003 to the Mediterranean Sea in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
SPENCER visited Spain, Crete, Greece and Ukraine during her patrol in
the Mediterranean. Working with four other vessels in the Joint Civilian
Orientation Conference, SPENCER demonstrated the Coast Guard’s role in
the war on terror.

In 2004, SPENCER
interdicted a migrant sailing vessel and repatriated 104 migrants in the
port of Port Au Prince. SPENCER was responsible for the seizure of 765
Lbs of cocaine from a Go-Fast that was stopped using disabling fire from
the new MH-68 HITRON helicopter.

In 2005, SPENCER assisted in two cocaine seizures totaling 13,000 lbs
before being diverted from a patrol in the Caribbean Sea to serve as a
fully operational command and control platform during the rescue efforts
following Hurricane Katrina. SPENCER was the first large ship to
navigate the Mississippi River after Katrina’s landfall, looking for
sunken barges, ships run aground, debris and destroyed navigational aids
during the ten-hour transit from the Mississippi delta to downtown New
Orleans. On scene downtown, SPENCER quickly coordinated Coast Guard
units and other agencies in an effort to rescue and evacuate citizens of
New Orleans, provide logistical support to smaller Coast Guard units
and establish a temporary vessel traffic control station on board. On
land and on water, SPENCER crewmembers tirelessly assisted people in
need by providing food, water, medical care and transportation out of
the devastated city In addition, SPENCER used her fully operational
helicopter deck capable of landing rescue helicopters and providing
critically needed fuel to assist in the rescue of 33,500 stranded
civilians. SPENCER’s crew received the Commandant’s Unit Commendation
Award for their support following Hurricane Katrina.

In 2010, SPENCER traveled to Argentina, Brazil, and
Uruguay in order to participate in UNITAS, a multinational naval
exercise, where she worked with submarines, ships, and aircraft from
five different nations. Later that year, she was the on-scene commander
when a fishing vessel collided with a freighter off New York Harbor.
SPENCER provided medical care and kept the stricken vessel afloat until
a salvage tug arrived. Most recently, she has patrolled the Caribbean,
interdicting migrants from Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In
addition to her law enforcement duties, her embarked helicopter
conducted a medical evacuation of a critically ill passenger from a
cruise ship.

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